Watch me drink a mug of coffee 👇

A super important topic, I don't think gets enough attention: Are we spending public money on social and affordable housing where it is needed most. Answer - no. But we have in the past, and can do so again. 🧵

The explanation here is that the Government has pursued 'small-r' planning reform that hasn't changed the discretionary, TCPA basis of our terrible system. There was a defensible case for that but low housebuilding today justifies the case for bigger reforms to move towards a flexible zoning system

Interesting proposals here from Sir John Kingman and Baroness Vadera on how to improve Britain's growth prospects - the second paper focuses on how important it is to get devolution to big cities right and comes with some chonky recommendations

For Burnham to reach his (tricky) goals on council housebuilding, he'll want his cash to go as far as possible - we've set out how: Four takeaways: 1. Focus on cities 2. Give councils balance sheet flexibility 3. Get mayors to distribute cash 4. Be broad-minded on defining council housebuilding:

I have a new paper out today on what Andy Burnham needs to do to achieve “the biggest council housebuilding programme since the post-war period”. A coherent (I hope) to-do list, explaining the contingencies and pre-empting potential missteps. Do read the paper in full, but here's a 🧵

Cities are only 9% of the UK's land area, but contain 61% of the country's jobs Sign up to our Substack for more data and charts like this every Tuesday!

Of course - the question here is what we mean by 'relatively'. Personally I am persuaded that female migrants are much more economically beneficial if they're in the labour market

We still have further to go on rebuilding metropolitan government in London so long as Shrek squats in County Hall

For sure yeah. For me the big takeaway is the simple argument you often hear that "it's good for the economy" isn't right as it's actually highly contingent (not least for things not really related to immigration policy ie our 'liberal' non contributory welfare state)

Isn't this besides the point? Maybe the data is optimistic or more mixed on current trajectory. But the argument here is really that any positive fiscal impact of immigrant households depends on women doing paid work + that work being high paid given design of our welfare state

Some great charts in this Given our welfare system is not very contributory, big Qs for British policymakers here on how we get more women into paid work if we want immigration to be fiscally positive

Thanks. We did consider it but the problem is both the taxbases and the existing commitments vary. We think the transitional problem is actually quite tricky but we do want to get to consistency and working the equalisation system harder in the medium term

👀👀👀

Thank you 🫡🫡🫡